There's so much entitled Valley logic in the business model at Uber that it's hideously disturbing,

There may be that, I'm not 100% sure. However, it is very hard for me not to see all these complaints about "rider safety" and such as nothing more than "protect the taxi companies!".

I've not heard of a single case of an Uber or Lyft ride going terribly wrong. Were there large numbers of cases of such they'd be out of business virtually overnight. If the taxi companies screw people over day after day you're going to do what about it? File a paper form that someone will promptly lose?

Although the world seems to focus on America, we must remember that aside from subsidized countries like Venezuela, Americans enjoy an average gas price that is much less than the global averages. That said, we must understand that the recent movement in crude prices is in direct correlation to the ongoing strategy that the United States has with choking off Russian monetary supplies. It's not a conspiracy theorist and as a pure market technician, which can be defined in my book The Market is not Random., the market foretold this sell off going all the way back to the swing sell in May...

Whenever one mentions that gas prices are so much higher elsewhere and that American's are lucky, one should also mention the why of gas prices being higher else where. It's almost always, if not always, entirely due to punitive taxation on fuel. According to the BBC filling up a 55 liter tank would currently cost about 68 pounds, of which 43 is bloody taxes. So, gas in the US isn't cheap. It just isn't taxed to death like in other parts of the world.

Google Wallet still has limited usefulness. NFC payments are still only supported on a tiny fraction of Android users, using a custom build of the wallet app not available in the Google play store. Only some phone distributors are given access to this custom build. My phone has android 4.4, NFC support, and Google wallet installed, but I can't do NFC payments. How do they expect to compete like that?

Nope, sorry. While you transition to a valid concern, the dismissal you lead with isn't quite right.

Firearm availability is one of the factors in these sorts of things. The kind of people who engage in emotionally driven mass shootings aren't the same kind of people who rise to any obstacle that impedes their plans. Barriers to firearm access(which isn't the same as ownership) would curtail these kinds of shootings.

Contains and absolutely requires the presumption that someone looking to get famous by killing large numbers of legislatively defenseless people and then promptly get on the news and have every facet of their miserable little lives examined for meaning they could never find themselves would somehow stop simply because they can't use a particular method. Your logic is that if we eliminate method A then they absolutely won't switch to B or that somehow B is better than A.

You want fewer of these incidents? Don't report on the shooters, don't glorify them, don't give them the fame and validation they crave and that ultimately drives these acts. Speak of the victims, sure. The shooter should be treated as a nameless pariah or if given a name at all it should be no more than name/age. No details, no examining their motivations, no wall to wall coverage of them. Having people in the school who can defend against such nutjobs and other threats would be good as well. Yet even that is simply mitigation of a phenomenon created almost entirely by what I've already put forth.

The underlying technologies of the SpaceCraftTwo are completely and woefully underdimensioned for actually reaching orbit. It's just not feasible to develop it into a craft that can do that. You need a completely different solution to do it.

And the Bell X1 was woefully underdimensioned and completely useless for commercial flight. SpaceShipTwo will never achieve the things that people seem to be implying it should nor is it intended to. It is intended to be a development platform for technologies and methods of manufacturing and business. SpaceShipWhatever on the other hand may be capable of these things and it will be thanks in part to SpaceShipTwo through whatever.

Because, you complete fucking genius, not everyone is 5' 2'' tall and of medium build. Why, if you are 6' tall, are you penalised with having to buy a more expensive ticket?

Because physics? Limited volume of space, all costs and profits must come from cargo (that's us) carried within that space. If some require significantly more room then logically it costs more to carry them and therefore it isn't completely unreasonable to charge them more. It's the same logic that's been applied to overweight people and which says larger hotel rooms cost more.

The trouble is, with enough money, your megaphone can be so loud it can drown out everything else.

In many ways the issue here is not so much louder megaphones or anything but a lazy electorate that doesn't bother to do even basic research or acquire understanding of either the candidates or the issues at hand.

The loudest megaphone in the universe cannot actually compel the electorate to vote in any particular way. Stupid people following the crowds and paying the most attention to things that matter the least is the real reason why any of this matters at all.

As the man in the movie said, if you're looking for the responsible party you need only look in a mirror.

... so bascially you're saying that you want to live in a system where our politcians can be legally bribed. I don't think most people agree.

As others have said, you think that wasn't going on before? Bribery is still illegal and CU didn't change that. All it did is recognize that when I, or anyone, contribute money to a cause that is a form of political expression, i.e. speech.

You don't think Unions and other groups were doing basically the same thing before either under the table or through less obvious means? Personally, I'd rather all such activities be out in the open as simply banning them will do nothing but push them underground and into smoke filled rooms.

It gives the wealthy disproportionate influence over governance. They have an established track record of setting up policies and institutions that are favorable to themselves and detrimental to society as a whole. That is not what free speech is for.

Only to the degree that regular people allow this to happen by apathy. Don't expect others or government to defend your views for you. That's never happened in history and there's no reason it should start now. If the wealthy have disproportionate influence over governance then it is because we gave it to them. The Bill Gates and others of the world can spread as much money as they like, but at the end of the day they get one vote and we get over 150 Million. Who really has the power here?

No, it isn't speech. It's used to provide you with a podium, but a podium is not speech, and has never been seen as such since the beginning of the US.

It's amusing that the Supreme Court has said on numerous occasions that the government has the right to regulate the means, location or time of speech (see: Anti-abortion protest laws, regulating where a mob can protest a convention, or better yet, limiting where someone can protest a speech by PRESIDENT BUSH) and yet you teatards have an issue with the Supreme Court regulating the MONEY used to make the speech. It's stupid.

Much as I said in a previous post, if you cannot make your point without using terms like 'teatards' then you really lose the debate right there. Further, your post contains a number of presumptions not the least of which being that I or those holding my views would somehow see the CU case as 'good' and would also see the gross failures of justice concerning some other SCOTUS rulings on the Free Speech question.

Speech is expression. If I don't own or control a TV network then realistically in this day and age one of the best ways I can express my beliefs is via the spending of money. Either on a company, or on or against a political candidate/position. I still maintain that the Left didn't get busted up about such things when it was "their" side doing it and only got upset over the CU case because now suddenly the Evil Right can do it too.

Also, you think Obama doesn't have/use free speech zones and other sorts of non-sense then you're deluding yourself. If you think that I don't see both as a terrible affront to Liberty then consider yourself corrected.

Anytime Congress passes serious reform, it gets struck down by a conservative Supreme Court that has no interest in reform and literally equates money with speech. The ONLY way to have serious reform that sticks is to...

1) Make sure Clinton gets into office in 2016, so she can appoint liberal judges once luddites and philistines like Scalia and Thomas are gone / die off.

2) Focus on an amendment to the Constitution that SPECIFICALLY says money is not speech for purposes of law.

That is it. Nothing else will do, because it will be OVERTURNED. Why is this so hard to understand, Lessig?

Sorry, you're wrong on many points but for the moment I'm only going to answer the cash != speech point. Money is speech when it is used to promote a political view. There simply is no other rational way to say it. The only reason the Left, of which you would appear to be one, are butt hurt about Citizens United is that the case has the effect of putting the Right on more equal footing with the Left's propaganda machine in the form of the majority of the media.

It was all good when Unions and various Left wing groups and causes could scream in the echo chamber but once CU broke the echo chamber and everyone could play now it is a bad thing. I'd think true Liberals, in theory those in favor of liberty one would imagine, would have cheered the ability for anyone to band together and form a PAC to promote their interests.

There probably should be a debate rule much like Godwin's that says in any debate on guns or really anything else not actually involving such, the minute your side pulls out "dick extensions" or like phrasing you lose.

The pro-rights side has history, logic and statistics on their side. The Anti-rights side has dick jokes, fear, racism and lies. Who should we really be listening to here?